Sometimes we need to send an email to a group of friends to announce some event (birth of child, move to Greece, farewell party). Due to the scourge of SPAM, we have to be careful how we do this, otherwise our email will be caught in the net and the other party will not see it. Over the years of publishing this email newsletter, I have discovered several things:

Do not SPAM.

Don't start an email with "Dear ..."

If possible, avoid HTML tags. Text is best.

Definitely avoid JavaScript.

Don't send an email to 100 people by putting their addresses in the "TO", "CC" or "BCC" fields.

Use a SMTP server on a static IP address.

Do not SPAM.

Let us imagine that I want to invite 30 friends for a "braai", which is a South African version of the barbeque. It works a bit differently here. First off, when we say: come at 18:00, we mean 20:00. And if you do come at 20:00, don't expect the fire to have started yet. Another curious feature is that it is fairly common to ask your guests to bring their own meat and drinks. This way, the braai scales better. So here is my invitation, "braai.txt", where the first line is the subject: